How I built a $3B AI Startup + 7 AI Business Ideas

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/5a0c6d987f84f378

been an engineer for like, you know, a couple decades now.
and they no longer write code.
I only prompt.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I'm putting my all in it like my days off. On the road less travel, never looking back.
But your story's crazy. So you're
High school dropout.
Grew up in Argentina.
Um
Have been building things and hacking on things since, you know, a very young age.
sold a company kinda early on. I don't know if it's big sale or small sale. And then you
Built.
This product that has just taken off. Every front end developer I know loves it.
It's valued, I don't know, three billion dollars or so, you know, whatever, give or take.
And
You've just done this incredible thing, and now and now you have this AI tool that's also like
Super on trend and is something that is doing really, really well. It's a really cool uh agent that that builds sites for you.
That's my version of the of the
The summary of your story. It's a great summary.
Maybe the only w thing I'll add is that
The crazy way that been able to go from like a teenager in Argentina to today was has been a lot of open source.
So being involved in
creating a lot of technologies that have become foundational in the tech ecosystem.
And I felt like
That and the web has sort of been my ticket.
To success, of course, over decades of hard work. Well, explain that. So why did you drop out of high school? Uh uh I've never been a
fan of like the high school draw out moniker because I actually really love the high school that I went to.
So is it high school in Argentina was the free
Public school.
that had a an entry exam, you had to study really hard to get in and it worked so hard.
To get in.
uh entered in position number ten out of like thousands of students.
But I had two competing interests. I was becoming popular in this open source ecosystem.
because I was creating libraries for JavaScript and front end development.
You're like
becoming popular at in open source, but you're only fifteen, sixteen years old. So when did you start? Started coding very early, like uh you know, seriously I would say when I was ten years old.
I was creating websites shipping. I started doing work online.
helping my parents with our uh like home finances.
Was it just a lucky break, or what got you started?
Lucky break.
In some ways, but um open source. So I was contributing a lot to like online forums, uh helping people out.
And the lucky part was I remember this guy who whose name I I guess I'll never know. It was like
Dark Shadow One Two Three. He's like, Hey, you seem to really enjoy helping people out by writing tutorials and guides and things like that.
There's this website a freelancing website. You could just
sell your services here'cause you know so many things about Linux and PHP and programming.
So there was a bit of a lucky break in that.
I figured out a business model for myself really early on.
I got my first check when when I was in like eleven years old, and
Sort of I had a client in the Netherlands when I was like twelve or thirteen.
Pretending to be a adult or are you
And I'm really uh I guess lucky that at the time like even Skype was not a thing. So it was like actually kinda rare that you have to get on the phone. So I really took advantage of that. But
So when I got into this high school.
my reputation for doing all of this work and then my reputation in the open source world.
We're both growing simultaneously.
So as my grades were decaying
my sort of online net worth and contribution
And notability.
in the world was growing.
So
I would write articles that would get to the front page of Dick dot com. I would write open source software that would get a lot of
Traction.
I would get written. Give give me a sense. Are you
I'm just saying in a dumb way. Like are you a genius or you were just being extremely helpful? Like was it just like
Nobody was writing the tutorial on how to host your WordPress site or whatever. Right, right. I said, Or wasn't like you were figuring things out and really cutting edge stuff. Where were you? Yeah, when I advise young people and like how to bootstrap their careers, I say, start by teaching anything. So I started with like
How to compile.
There was a project called RPPPO
to get internet connectivity in Linux. It's like it's just like writing down the to the H IGPT would do a a hundred times better job, right? Or like
At best it becomes training data for an AI to then explain it back to people.
But then over time.
I started coming up with my own breakthroughs.
And so I I my quote unquote big break was I started contributing to a library called Moo Tools.
When it was
fifteen, sixteen years old.
And this library got picked up by Facebook.
to become sort of the inspiration slash foundation for their javascript infrastructure.
And I got a job offer from Facebook when I was like seventeen years old.
And so
my contributions to that project were starting to become more important.
And so you got a job offer from Facebook when you were fifteen? Yeah. So I was
I was probably seven teen, sixteen.
So super early days of uh Facebook. So in many ways
You know, you could have
play out another timeline in which I was in America already and like I was an early engineer at Facebook, things like that. Did you turn it down? Well, when they discovered I was in Argentina and other age, I was like oh yeah, maybe we should look for someone else. But that same project kept opening up up doors for me.
Because other startups started using the same foundation and they were like, Hmm, who should we hire? And the first thing you think of is I'm gonna hire the people that contribute to the project. We do that ourselves today with our open source projects. Like next year, as we go and like
Okay, who's contributing like mm, that person seems really interesting.
So
When
I was about eighteen.
That's when this startup
From Switzerland reached out and saying, Hey, like we wanna hire a Moodle developer.
That's what I basically just
drop out of high school. Like I I I had my first real job offer from a company in Lausanne, Switzerland.
And for my parents, for myself, it was kind of surreal, right? Like I'd never left the country.
And I was like leaving Argentina for the first time with a job offer in hand.
And a like an amazing country. Yeah. And he emailed me, Johnny Dallas, and he said
Hey, I love to code.
I my dad met somebody I met Pete at a dog park, this our cis uh ass admin guy.
And he was like, um
I don't know anyone else who codes.
Can I just come hang out for the summer? I just want to be around other programmers. And I was like, Oh man, amazing. Yes, for sure.
He comes in first day, we just actually give him a test. We're like
Hey, we want you to make this little onboarding quiz.
H T M L I'll just make a quick.
Multiple choice.
Take them down to flow and land them in one of these four buckets.
And he just sits there and he sits there to like seven or eight at night. I feel bad, but he's like not asking for help.
I just want to see how it plays out. And he actually ships the quiz at the end of the the evening. I was like
Alright, this kid's legit.
By the time he's in tenth grade.
We're like,'cause you know, he's working basically full time for after school, he's coming in.
And so we had this um
I had a conversation with his mom, I remember at the like downtown, and she's like I can't imagine my son being like a high school dropout.
And I said
Do you know LeBron James and Kobe Bryant? I was like your son is going pro.
And so I think that should be a little bit of a Yeah, totally. If any kid is listening to this
It worked like a charm on on that mom.
Try this on your mom or try this on it on anybody where you can really go pro early. Yeah, totally. I I always give people very caveated advice, right? Like I tell them, look
I went to high school that was giving us
College level content.
So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model.
I was
I became quite competent in l a lot of sciences and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, et cetera.
So I'm actually really thankful that it had a good foundation.
And then by the time
I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote
educational career.
I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it's really clear that my my skill were gonna take me somewhere.
I didn't know specifically I was gonna get in.
it I was eventually gonna end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was
Well substantiated in
Existing evidence of success.
You're talking about Moo Tools and JavaScript.
I read something great that you said. You you go
I kinda bet
on JavaScript because I realized that
For the back end there's you know
A hundred different languages you could choose.
But the fr the browsers only know JavaScript. Yeah. It's like an unfair advantage.
Looking back, I think
You you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages.
And
JavaScript has this unfair advantage.
that. And and I can explain how it won as well, but
Right now.
Every single device on the planet.
on the client inside a br web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript.
It can't run Python, it can't run C, it can't run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives.
So way back in the day we had
Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs
put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that, by the way? Was his absolutely stays correct? Absolutely.
We had Java applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM Java was gonna be that universal language.
And the fact that
w when I started going deep into JavaScript, it was there was still a little bit of a perception of like
It's like a toy.
W why was that? Why was'cause okay, I'm a mostly non technical person.
But I I love you see I love situations like this where like
There was a hundred contenders and one win, but it doesn't win because it had the obvious traits that you would think would win. But there's this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage to
Yeah, we were just talking about like mid journey before this. Uh yeah and we're like mid journey, like it's not like the product design. It's not like somebody some designer sat down and say,
Then you'll open up Discord.
There'll be a hundred random channels and in it it'll be strangers making images, but actually
Bad was better. Bad was good. Yeah. Because you learned how to use it by hurting it.
Yeah, uh not worse I haven't seen worse better. I I've seen the Paul Bucket one.
Where he's like
Uh, if you're great, you don't have to be good. I think it's similar, but can you explain worse is better? Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it it specifically that essay uh spoke about
Worse in the sense of less powerful.
Because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable.
And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the found the successful foundation of the internet.
But there's a broader point that
Brendan Ike, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out
Which is
That sometimes the success of technology s or start ups.
can be best understood through the lens of evolution.
In natural selection.
In Darwinism.
Rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design.
So there was an article that he shared at one point called
What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures? Okay.
And so JavaScript
It was almost like uh
piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time.
But started out looking very simple, small
It was a piece of code that he would inline into the markup.
So we've when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML.
It's like
Can we bring HTML slightly more alive? Okay, so we need something that's very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code.
And from there it became more powerful, more sophisticated. But most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, Well
It can't be fast.
It can't be typed.
It can't be correct.
It can't scale. It can't have a module system. But all of these observations that people were making were not actually
Paradoxically they were not
Quite technical.
We're like well at that point as it exist at that time.
It cannot do those things.
So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, like, Well
We can add this thing.
So very simple example.
It's a little technical but
JavaScript lacked classes.
It couldn't do
object oriented programming in the conception that people had
with things like
action script or C plus plus or Java
But in the Moodles team, we did figure out a way of
quote unquote faking it.
We created a function called class with an uppercase C
When we present it to developers like Well like
So you added classes to JavaScript?
Well, yeah, we kind of added them.
And that actually was one of the salient features that that stood out to the Facebook team and and many other teams in the Bay Area.
And so
By evolving that thing.
And actually betting on it.
that became the asymmetry of of my early career. And and again, like
the experts at the time, and this is why I think there has been a shadow of doubt
Cast on experts.
For many years. Now the experts
I think we're familiar with this because Angel Investments that are successful
had the same characteristics of like uh
Look at how rough that ent entrepreneur looks. Or like look at how shitty the homepage looks. And like you have to be able to project out.
what it's gonna be in the future. And now JavaScript has eaten the world.
Yeah, one of the best blog posts I ever did was I just went back to the way back machine. I just said
Here's what the first website of Airbnb looked like. Here's what the first website of Uber looked like. Which brilliant actually is like very important for entrepreneurs to look at. You kind of know intellectually
If I asked you, you'd be like, Yeah, probably started off rubbish.
But literally go look at it. Read it.
Look at the thing. Look at the pixels. Look at the actual pixels because it does a couple of things. First it
You're overthinking it. Whatever you're doing, you're probably overthinking to start to launch.
Second, it shows how far you really have to go to like iterate to get make things better. And also like how narrow of a wedge you take. Like the Airbnb initial one is like
There's a design conference.
The hotels are booked and expensive.
Stay on sleep on another designer's couch or or airbed.
Yeah. And you just take so much from those like initial
Initial web pages.
And you're right, like
Once you hang around in Silicon Valley and if it humbles you
So that the things that look like toys, or the things that start narrow, or the things that seem limited on six dimensions, but are really good at the one thing.
They can't be underestimated. And it does raise the question of genius versus accident.
V in there there's just so many good stories about the creation of JavaScript. One was the extreme time constraint that Mark Andrewson put Brendan Ike into.
The reason it's called JavaScript is they needed to market it as Java.
They just added script. There's no relation whatsoever between the two things. And so
The other one was I think Brendan always says that
It took him ten days to conceive the language.
And that's
Primarily because of deadlines.
So like okay, we have to ship something that makes pages come alive.
For those that are not technical, the way that I sometimes explain
what we do with running JavaScript on the server and running it on the client is
There's this newspaper in Harry Potter.
Uh, which is like a regular newspaper, but when you open it, it comes alive. So think of getting the newspaper as the server is giving you the
server rendered, pre-rendered artifact. So it comes with all the letters, all the static images, et cetera. But then it's really cool that you can open it.
And it what we call it technically is it becomes hydrated, it becomes alive, and more code can run on your side of the equation.
And that can be a very enri enriched experience.
So that's the power of JavaScript. That's a great analogy.
production line, it could be manufactured, could be printed.
But then it can be shipped to you.
And then it can become alive again. And so
In those ten days, Mark Andreessen wanted to basically
Pitch that like
One of the initial names is I think Life Script.
It's like and then they rename the Java script to
marketed more to like the enterprise traction that it'd be akin to today.
Like we wanna call things agents and perhaps they're not agents or whatever, like
So you get to use the evolution example, it's like the skin color blended in with the trees. It's like Java script just blended in with the Java. That's right. That gave it an evolutionary advantage. Versus getting eaten because it's it out. The other interesting observation is okay, so you have ten, twelve days you have to ship something, whatever
And what is the minimum surface that he can ship on top of which evolution can be bootstrapped?
I think that's much better than try to aim for completeness of that initial version. And what I ask myself when I study the success of others is.
Were they really clever to think, hmm, I have to delete, delete, delete, like
I think we're referencing Rick Rubin's reducing
thing I'm a reducer, not a producer.
So I think
If you're r truly brilliant, I think you'll find that
You have to
delete and delete and delete, and that's one path to success.
And because you know what the more complete picture would look like, but you can exercise that restraint.
Or
You can just stumble upon it through deadlines, right? Like you have the classic Y C
Let's make you ship a startup in three months.
And so that it's acts as a forcing function for the reduction of the surface. And I think there's something about human nature.
Or perhaps
The pressure that people put themselves under, which is that I have to add more.
I have to make that home page.
I have to add more images, I have to add more gradients, whatever. But then through the exercise that you talked about, you can go back and see, well, actually
Things looked pretty simple.
And they focus a lot on the content and the on the essentials.
So
You
You're doing Moo Tools, you you go out there to Switzerland.
How do you get to Verseel and what's the like insight you have to start this company that has become this juggernaut, right? Like I think I've DM'd you like every year for three years being like, Hey, can I invest in this thing? Cause I'm such a juggernaut that like so obvious to me that when you have this sort of developer love.
Yeah. You really can't help but win and you were like on the you were on the right waves that uh to be on for the last few years. The pattern throughout my career has been iteration velocity is the most important thing to optimize for.
So my previous startup which I sold to WordPress
Anytime I would start a project
before starting the project, I would start on the mechanism
To ensure
I was CTO of that startup. I start on the mechanism.

Colleagues.
My engineers
My everyone in the company could ship really
Fast.
My obsession became how quickly can you go from idea?
to shareable artifact.
From idea.
to URL.
And today is
seems obvious that V zero is so successful and that you can prompt and get a link and you can go from prompt to application.
But I didn't have AI at the time.
What I had was what I can do is I can streamline the deployment pipeline of ideas.
So just s so I can summarise what you said. You said
Most important principle for me when I work on a project is
That we're gonna be able to ship fast and iterate fast. Ship fast. In order to ship fast and iterate fast.
We need like our our pit crew. Yes. You know, if we're a formula one car, we need our pit crew to not take
Six hours to change the tires or to get a refueled to get back on the road to go for go for the next lap.
So what you were saying is you would focus more than the average bear.
On that that pit stop.
between idea and because virtually didn't exist. So I had it like I had the insight that
Instead of just assuming that the world that maybe takes hours to ship
Or you can ship once a week. I was like no.
Let's look at the web. The web is so fluid because of all of the reasons that we just outlined. It's just
is so alive, why can we be shipping a hundred times a day?
Why can't we try lots of different things?
I I actually just interviewed recently for offsite the the founder of DoorDash.
And he was talking about how DoorDash started out with one HTML page.
in six PDFs of the restaurants that they were gonna deliver for
And they just brought the idea online as soon as possible.
So to some people it becomes obvious that the most important thing is to get the idea out into the world as a URL.
And see if it sticks.
So I wanted to create a platform where that was the norm.
And that was sort of the inception, the idea for Versea.
And because before Versea I was at WordPress, I noticed
WordPress as a company had become quite good at deploying one app.
Wordpress dot com.
But if you were working for the company and you had a new idea
You were kinda getting stuck.
You had to go to the IT team and be like, Hey, please, can you set up a server?
For me.
Can you give me an area here where I can
come up with a new application or a new idea.
And so Verse started out as
Can we reduce that friction from idea to live?
Two seconds.
In fact, it became such an obsession, it started measuring each millisecond of like you have an idea, you write it down in JavaScript or HTML or whatever, you press deploy.
How quickly can we get it online?
I love the Formula One.
Uh metaphor.
Because it was it's about shaving down the seconds that were stopping the scar.
In this car is not just one app.
Or one idea or one person is literally how the entire business works.
This is why Versailles been so successful with
The largest companies in the world.
Like
Investment banks.
And also it powers most of the Y C startups that are creating new ideas in the manner that I just described, which is like
Hey, I need to try something out and I need to hit
Demo day. What is the quickest way to deploy its versal?
So it sounds like this might be one of those startups where you didn't need to pivot a ton. It sounds like you maybe had the correct idea.
Like you knew the pain, you knew the problem correctly, and it sounds like you had the right idea of a solution, then you obviously made it better. Yeah. But is that true? Yes and no.
So
When you achieve some level of success
People start studying your success a lot.
And people ask me a lot, like did you pivot, did you not pivot, that w w what it can be for the chicken or the egg?
And the reason that they asked me this is
We have an extraordinary successful open source project.
That were still created called NextJS.
Next. Powers a lot of the modern internet. Like you talked about mid journey, mid journey is built with NextJS.
And by the way you you make money off of that? I didn't understand that. It's just you open source that has a widely adopted
Does Verstell benefit in it in any way, really? Or because it's in the service of okay, how can we get that formula one car going?
Okay, start with Next JS, you're gonna cut down on the whole assembly of the car. Okay. The alternative to NextJS is that you have to procure the
The chassis and the wheel and the engine. Like this is actually what was happening to engineers when I started the company. I was like,
Okay, so how do you start a new idea?
Oh well I go to
Home Depot.
and I shop for like two hundred different kinds of wheels and I grab the wheel and I go to this thing and
And then I assemble the Formula One car.
And then maybe I get started running it and then maybe I see if I have product market fit. So you created NextJS
And I I believe the story is you were trying to build something.
And to use React, you're like, Oh shit, I gotta like go get the engine and the test, I gotta go get all these pieces.
All right, I'm just gonna build this kind of template for myself. The website for the company. Kinda like the experience of DoorDash. Like I had to build
Zeit.co, our domain name at the time.
And say, Okay, to get started with React, I have to do like get a PhD.
So to your point about was the idea correct, this idea is so powerful.
That you cut down the time for humanity to go from
Some hypothesis.
to a production grade deployment.
And
Going down from weeks of setup.
To seconds, it seems obvious.
What was not obvious and felt like
Endless pivots.
was
Narrowing down the scope.
The reduction that you just talked about.
We started out with like, Oh, you can deploy anything.
You can deploy Java.
It's so contradictory even to my Genesis story, right? Like
You can deploy Haskell.
You can deploy PHP.
You can
And then we realize, wait, why are we doing all this?
Clearly we we believe
That the modern web
Will be powered by frameworks like Connect JS.
And we believe that there's an there's alpha in the market and the world of
democratizing this idea of using both JavaScript
As your sort of like back end and front end language, which
Massively simplifies software development.
So
I will say we didn't pivot in the sense of going into a different space.
But we simplified the offering way, way, way significantly.
You have this interesting
Where you get to see
What a bunch of people are building.
on your platform or using VC or whatever.
And then you also just like
You're on the
Edge I would say of like
Tinker, hacker, technical person who kinda sees what's possible, but you only have so many hours in the day.
So you tweeted out this thing that said
Free AI ideas. Yeah. And it's like
If Gordon Ramsey opened up a lemonade stand. It's like oh wow, like you know Steve Jobs was like, Hey, free product lessons.
For toddlers. Yeah. I'd be like get my daughter in that class, right? So when you say free AI ideas, I want to show up. So
Can we run through some of your AI ideas? Yeah. And I'll give you a little bit of background, right? So
I've always been obsessed with democratizing the web for everyone.
So any w anyone with an idea has to be able to create.
That's why we created V Zero because
These years like chat GPT, but for creating web applications.
Instead of giving you text, it gives you a fully working web application.
Make me an app or a site. You can literally type that in. It'll it'll make one, yeah. And the difference, I would say, uh there's many players that are trying to build this, but
one of the things that I'm really excited about is that
It's banking on the lessons of the last ten years of building the world's most popular framework for JavaScript.
in building the production grade infrastructure to support it.
Right.
I
I'll name a cool brand that uses Vercelle.
Ramp.
Supreme dot com.
uh Brex. In fact we we have so many successful companies in every market segment that you could imagine.
But all of those companies needed expert engineers.
Right? Like in order to build
Like a really cool website, like
uh drink ag water dot com.
You need to learn next year.
Now the magic of Rocelle is that we cut down the learning from like I need to know all of the foundations of computer science and all of the foundations of AWS.
And how to deploy software.
We brought it down to like
Take a react course.
And using XJS.
But with AI, we can cut that down even further.
Shouldn't speak English.
And we will
Steer the model.
Towards what we think are gonna be the world's most successful outcomes.
We care deeply about performance.
When
E commerce websites deploy on Versale?
They vastly out compete.
Everything else.
So we'd recently heard about a public company
That sells billions of dollars worth of consumer electronics a year.
That
improved their conversion rate by thirty percent on some markets to ninety percent on some other markets. Why? Because
The website is faster.
So imagine if you could go to an agent and say, I wanna create
The next big
compared to Apple.com.
We're gonna make it faster, more accessible, beautifully designed, and deployed on this enterprise grade infrastructure. You get those out of the box. Get those for free. Out of the box. So and it's
true to the spirit of the company of like, how can we get that Formula One car running as soon as possible?
So it's opening up
Creation and deployment.

Every human on the planet.
Okay. But you were saying that's context for the AI ideas because what?
Because of two things. One is that with V zero
Any idea that I have, I can bring it to reality.
But then there is a meta.
So
We're being very successful with V Zero because we created
AI for web engineers.
or AI for people that are interested in shipping to the web.
There's gonna be so many other verticals that are gonna be similarly disrupted.
And it seems really obvious to me because
I'm on the
You know, to your point, and behind the scenes of building things like V Zero.
But I think there's gonna be, for example, why don't we have a V zero for creating video games?
A studio
That combines the best of both worlds of software one point oh techniques and software two point oh techniques. And I don't know if you're familiar with that framework, but explain.
So Andrew Kirpathy
Who's the leader of AI at Tesla?
in later open AI.
Came up with this incredible essay that I think is canon now. Like everybody must read this because it's so ahead of its time.
of he called Software two point oh.
And he says, Look, software one point oh was
What I grew up with.
Programming languages.
data structures.
Uh
Algorithms.
You learn how to make things more efficient by
writing better for loops and recursion and you're in control of everything.
And everything is very deterministic and predictable.
So two point oh still using foundations of computer science, but
We're making the process a lot more stochastic.
Probabilistic.
Instead of writing every circuitry of the programming language
We're on training models with data.
And the output of what those models do might resemble what a program
might do on its own. Like a one point oh program might do on its own. So the best example would be
You can use Chad GPT four O with image generation.
To produce
Like
Incredible diagrams.
And there's ways of generating those diagrams with traditional software engineering.
But this
AI is almost like this miracle general purpose program that can do anything.
Based on what it's been trained on.
So
Let's call training and neural networks and
AI software two point oh.
And it has all of this magical emergent properties.
That we're not
Thought through by the engineers.
The engineers didn't have to go and write every if
else branch that is under the hood and think about every corner case.
And that's why it's so exciting to people because
Every time a new model comes out, we're all like we call it
Discovering the latent space.
We're all trying to figure out what is even possible because even the creators of the models don't know what's possible, which is in stark contrast.
To software one point oh.
So for one point oh is like there's a PM giving you tickets. Right. I know you know exactly what this can do. I know exactly what it can't do. Yes. I know if you push this button, you're gonna get this exact result. I know if you push that button, you're gonna get that exact result.
The new model you're saying, even the makers of it are like
I'm not sure exactly what it could do, how well it could do.
You push this button, you're gonna get something. Yes.
It could be phenomenal. It could be, you know, a little bit
Unpredictable in some ways. But my what I offer is that the successful AI products of the future.
Are gonna be an intersection of these two worlds.
Your the software one point oh parts of the product are still gonna be highly valuable.
If not, V zero would just be
purely an autonomous AI, but
Think about it, it's still writing next. Code.
Is it still using UIs that make it friendly for people?
It's it still has a community of t of templates that you can
Cli with one click deploy.
And it's still banking on the ten years of investment over cell infrastructure.
and our partner infrastructure like Superbase and Neon and the databases that we bring in.
So
I think people are gonna be able to do this in many other verticals.
So video games is an obvious one to me because
You will want
parts of the game engine to be just like Unreal Engine is, right? Like you'll want something like a NextJS.
But for video games that is under the hood.
But then you want to open up video game creation to as many people as possible. Like start with a prompt.
And you're gonna be like
I wanna create something that is like Pokemon Red.
Uh but the art should resemble this and it should be in three dimensional space.
And it has ten missions. So you start describing with English what do you actually want.
So is this possible today? Like is the tech uh the tech could do this today?
Oh yes.
In fact I'm like, Why does someone have done people, please? Like, where are you all at?
And so I'll tell you some of the things that we've done to help facilitate this world. So
Using the game engine metaphor
You can think of B Zero as one video game that Vercell built.
And you can think of Vercelle as a game engine.
And so there's gonna be way many, many other video games that people are gonna create. So if you have an idea for an AI agent, you can deploy it on the Verse platform.
So you can you can do
V zero for doctors. You can do V zero for
video games. You can do V zero for lawyers. So
Any vertical that you can imagine we even templatized.
So we've open source a lot of what makes V zero so great.
So that entrepreneurs can come in and say, Like, look
I see an opportunity for AI to disrupt this space.
Let's take the video game example quick. I think you made did you make a Doom thing or did you use did you support Doom or was that an AI generated Doom?
No, so that was uh uh w the one you're talking about is my Doom CAPTCHA. So for context, I'm uh uh I hate CAPTCHA, first of all.
Like Capture is a thing like Capture where you go to a website and it tells you, Please tell me how many'cause you're like
That's right.
Select the staircases. Yeah.
So I created one which was instead of you select staircases or stop lights
You have to
Kill three enemies in Doom.

Yeah.
And funny enough, the idea came over to cr uh Christmas break.
And what I did is I went to V Zero.
And I said I want to create a CAPCA that looks exactly like Google Capcha.
'Cause it i it needs to look familiar for people for the joke to like pops up. Yeah. Yes.
And then I basically took advantage of the fact that Doom has been open sourced.
So what I did is and this is kinda like a m maybe a little bit more of advanced engineering here, but like I took a web assembly version of Doom that can run inside the browser.
And they prompted my way.
to basically spawn the user in a very specific level.
And then this actually involved hacking the C code base of of the uh of the game.
And then
Basically set it up so that it was a constrained version of the video game. So
You kill three players and you pass
The capture.
So it's almost like creative engineering, you can call it.
Uh, and this is something I think is also gonna be big in in in in the world. You could argue that someone could create an entire platform.
For just creative coding.
AI for creative coding. We're like
The next generation of artists

playing in this dynamic medium.
they're gonna be offering up things that are highly interactive. So you could create
The V zero for interactive art.
Um, so it's kinda meta, right? But like I started with V Zero and then created this thing and it went viral and like there's like three or four like news articles written about it. But it literally took
A couple hours of prompting. Like myself, I've been an engineer for like
You know, a couple decades now.
And they no longer write code.
I only prompt.
the last one on this video game then'cause it kinda blows my mind that that's possible. I I would have assumed it's not possible yet. Is can it only make very simple Flappy Bird style games? Or can it make like
Can you build a Fortnite? Can it make Fortnite? You know, where are we at today of like what's actually possible?
Yeah, so there's two levels to this. If you go to V Zero today, you could prompt and create it while one off the video game.
But the next level is that I think there's gonna be entrepreneurs who are gonna create the next big AI platforms.
And deploy them to overcell.
And so it depends on where you want to play. If you just want to create something that looks like Fortnite.
You could do that today. You could just promise.
Make it possible.
Really? Yeah.
I mean
I think you'll probably go down a journey similar to what JavaScript went through.
Where you'll you're gonna be able to get something basic.
Going.
And
It might take you the next ten years to perfect it to the level of what Fortnite is today. But this is the beauty of things like V0, like anybody can cook.
You can start, you can get it out there.
Kind of like DoorDash was six PDFs and a website.
You can get the B Zero
of Fortnite out there into the world.
But I think there's also gonna be ambitious
People that maybe have skills that are more on the game engine side.
kinda like I created next JS and can say look
There's an opportunity to create a framework.
that works really well with LMs.
That enables
broad massive scale game creation.
And the things that you can facilitate in that world are
For example, for a game to be successful, it needs really high quality textures.
It is really
Cool art.
So you can start creating kind of like a platform that facilitates bringing the art in.
So that's why I mentioned with
you will need software one point oh skills just to create kind of like the platform and and create the connective tissue.
That facilitates this highly opinionated workflow.
Because creating video games
You know, obviously there is a lot that is like
Art in like emergent.
the the game creator has to come in with an idea.
But there's a lot of things that are highly predictable. Like there is there's
Kinds of games.
to the platformer.
What does a two D platformer need? Well
All of the
runtime infrastructure all of the
Things that make a game work already exist on the internet.
Uh and the AI's
perfectly capable of sort of orchestrating it.
So would a game a would be game creator
would need is a very easy way of like
generating the the game assets.
And so what I would do if I was an entrepreneur doing this is like I would connect it to other image generation models.
So that when you come to this game creation studio
I'm kind of like guiding you into like here's all the things that you're gonna need. Here's all the integrations. Sound creation is another good example.
Eleven labs allows you to create
Sounds with LMs.
In fact, I've vibe coded a few things that required sound.
And instead of like Googling for like
open source sound effects or whatever
I just went to eleven laps and a prompted for that.
So
And I can do that because I know everything that kind of exists in the AI world. I know that eleven last year's engineering.
Exactly. But
Imagine a would be game creator that doesn't know that. So they just wanna go to a platform that o has already built in sound creation with AI.
And so behind the scenes you can sort of like plug this in. So
Maybe to summarise, I think
There's
All of this permutations of technologies that already exist.
that are making new platforms possible.
And I think entrepreneurs don't need to like go and train foundation models.
They just need to go in.
And put the pieces together into opinionated workflows.
The things that are becoming obvious to people today
Are you know
AI for legal.
AI for developers.
And I think those are kinda like the
Zero to one.
Is what feels very immediate, what feels very emergent.
I sometimes call it unbundling chadge be d.
When ChPT came out
People were like, Hm.
I can ask it for a
a draft of a
NDA.
And so people said, You know, I you I can take that slice of an idea and I can turn it into a legal platform.
What we realized is like, hmm, you can go and ask it for web UI.
Chad GPT was quite good at outputting
you know, React, HTML, next year's.
And so we went and said, Oh, this can be V zero. This can be a whole platform for web development.
And so I th what I challenge people to think about is that
What are those like
Clusters of queries.
That people are going to Chad GPT four.
There can become entire platforms. And I'm sure there are a lot of people that are going to these things and saying, Like
I wanna create a video game.
But this is just one of the many ideas that I shared on that thread. Right.
So uh let's go back to this type form idea. So this seemed like a super simple one, which I like'cause like
You don't need to build like world changing blah blah blah just to be able to just to be able to do this. Yeah, yeah.
So that one
arose from the fact that
If you look at why Typefront has been so successful
It's an interface innovation.
It gives you one question at a time.
It feels friendly.
For the
I mean I hate
respond to surveys, but
the most paddle that you can make it for me is if you give me
Multiple choice.
Boom. Oh I'm gonna have to answer this whole long page. Yeah, here's an IRS form. Please spill it out. In fact IRS would probably have
way higher completion rates and people paying taxes on time if like they they create a better UI, essentially.
Have you ever used TurboTax, by the way?
Termotext is actually a phenomenal experience.
Mm-hmm.
It's type form.
One question at a time.
They don't ask you for things that you don't know the answers to.
Which is the problem with taxes.
No, like what do you owe? No, they just And this is one of the golden rules of onboarding.
Right? Forget about forms onboarding, like
Give me one thing to do.
Remove all the distractions.
Remove all the links.
that might take me out of the flow.
I
I give people this little hack sometimes, like
If you're in a flow where you want people to complete a task.
Why are you making the logo clickable?
And why I there like six fooder links taking me to like the fucking
Why a destructive person. So
I uh type form kudos, like they they nailed that.
But I think there might be an opportunity on two levels. One is I I keep using this formula of
If I need to create a form and very quickly send it to you.
I could have the B zero.
For form creation.
Where I prompt my way.
To tune the form.
Yeah,'cause it could even come up with the questions for you. Exactly. Like hey, I'm coming up with a g uh I'm trying to get
Uh, I'm asking my friends what dates work for the Bachelor Party, send a quick survey out to my friends. If actually make it fun. I'm sure someone will go to V Zero listening to this.
And start creating.
The
AI form creator, right? Yeah. I think it's a really good idea. And by the way, the I think there's a uh add-on to this. So I had a similar idea once, but uh
I was thinking we own this business called Somewhere.com. Great domain name. Yeah. We paid a great price for this domain name. I'm your jury's out on that one.
But you know, you find talent in Latam or South Africa or you know your story, right? There's talent
Is everywhere.
Opportunity is not always everywhere, and so
When the website the way it works today is you land.
And you click like okay, I want to start hiring and then there's the long form.
And it's all there's a bad experience. It's like
Your name, what you're hiring for, your budget, you know, do you need full time, part time, whatever.
And then it says, Great, now book a call and then you're gonna talk to the sales guy and I'm like
You know, with AI, what this should really do is it should you should land and be like
Hey, what are you hiring for? What do you need?
And you say what's your what's I need a designer.
Cool. So yeah, cool. We got plenty of designers. We actually ha just hired designers for X company XYZ company.
Tell me, do you are you look for a graphic designer? Yeah, what are they gonna do? And you kind of just quickly tell it.
It says
You know, we recently placed somebody like this.
Res candidate profile pulled from our system. Yeah.
And just say
You know, would this be the type of person that you know would fit the type of thing you're looking for? They cost this much. That's yeah, pretty affordable to be able to hire somebody of this level of talent.
And you're like, Yeah, yeah, that would be great. More like that. It's like awesome, what's your email? I'll send it to you.

It's a salesperson. It's not a phone. And it's a salesperson that does what all saleswomen do. They ask questions, they follow they note what you say. They respond intelligently. They follow up where they need. They disqualify you if you're not a good fit. And if you are a fit, they're basically giving you
It's a proof and promise along the way to get you to say yes.
I can't believe this doesn't exist. It's a more dynamic interface, right? So you said something really interesting, which is
I think when people have ideas
It's like they're looking, they're staring into like a vector space. They know that there's something there that they want to do. And this is for everything, like
You may have an idea for like a survey that you want to send to your customers.
And you're like, Yeah, I know that
It's mostly about getting product feedback.
And how happy they are.
And what they do for work.
But you might be
forgetting that there is a very important question that people that do this surveys typically ask.
And you just don't know about it. This is why an AI first
type form would make so much sense because
When you prompt it, I want it this form for this thing.
It'll know that you don't. Right.
And and g it this even goes back to
And it'll, by the way, summarise all the results for you.
Yeah.'Cause it'll be like
You know, that's otherwise a full manual step I have to do.
Great, we got three hundred responses.
All right, I gotta go through those. And this is why AI is gonna disrupt everything because you what you just talked about, like, okay, I can also bring AI to the
Results process.
And my other point was you can even bring AI to the
submission process because instead of
Being rigid.
And making you select between
twenty things and then you press other and whatever. There might be innovations also in the
Maybe it's like purely conversational, maybe it's hybrid conversational
And what we call generative UI, which is that
On the fly. Exactly. It on the fly it chooses
What is the right format?
To answer this question.
And he might learn
Th another thing that humans do poorly is
Where do you hear from us? And we write down fucking like AOL and Google and you're like, Wait, does anyone use this anymore? That should also you should also give it to the A AI to choose
Okay.
This customer is coming from Argentina.
So in Argentina no one uses this name on their link.
That's right.
Yeah. But this is a A plus plus plus plus idea. Th there were a lot of people nitpicking my idea in the in the thread, which is like this is a freaking tweet storm like I'm not like like describing the freaking entire company, right?
And they were saying, No, but UI is still better because so it's like
Sure, but again, it doesn't mean that the UI is as rigid as it is today.
In that
The aid choices of checkboxes are rigid as well. And
In um I remember there was this company called Woo Foo.
in a Y C batch at one point, they had created a beautiful for a builder.
And the form builder was all drag and drop and you had to select the type of response.
All of that stuff is gonna go away. In fact I would give you us a rule of thumb that
If Dragon Drop is involved as a primary
i uh interaction mechanism it's probably ripe for disruption. Because no one wants to actually drag and drop stuff.
You just want to say, like, this is my idea, just build it. Right, right. That yeah, that's like a tell. It's like a poker tell. Drag and drop is like the maybe to use the software one point oh and two point oh metaphor.
Drag and draw was was making one point no more paddleable.
Inaccessible to more people.
Visual coding, visual programming was that as well.
How can we make one point more accessible? Well we invented
dragging stuff and showing it into dimensional space.
Um, let's do some more. So you had one that was called AI camera. What's the AI camera idea?
This is back to like
Embrace the rapper.
Embrace the fact that
Models are fucking phenomenal.
And there's a few.
hyper online people like me that know all of them or try to know all of them of like
deep Gram V three just landed on Hasin, whatever. Like you're paying attention to that level of of depth. Yes. But the average consumer just wants to say
Awesome photos. Yeah.
And so
I've been
This one came up because we were at a very big meeting for a bank that wanted to use Vercelle in New York.
And the champion on the bank side was like
Let's take a photo with the beautiful like
New York.
backdrop, whatever.
And it was so awkward that we tried it to we tried to take the photo twenty times.
Because it's hard to take a photo with like
Where's the sun and the back line? We want New York to be visible, but we want our faces to be visible and like
Someone blinks.
During the photo.
And so If there's men involved in a photo, it's a terrible photo. Taking it, standing in it, posing in it, then we don't know how to do any of it.
Think of the input from the shutter. Think of the click of the camera.
And this is a software camera, like a camera app.
As the input into the prompt
Rather than the output.
I'm
Extremely good at taking photos, it could just be the output.
Or maybe it's lightly tuned and filtered and whatever and be and becomes the output. But maybe just embrace the fact that it's an idea to give the AI.
Right.
And the AI will know that if that photo was taken in that place
The goal is to obviously show people smiling.
No one should be blinking.
The backdrop needs to look amazing. And, you know, maybe actually gives you five permutations of
D we know what good looks like.
We know the shades, the lighting, the
Maybe it removes objects for you.
And so I also mentioned
That
There is software one point oh techniques and software two point oh techniques to embed into everything. You shouldn't believe that you need the perfect model that'll make the photo perfect, or either.
You can give people a workflow.
So what I had imagined at the time was like it's gonna look like Instagram because I love the how Instagram
You took the photo?
And then filter pick it.
San Ramon filter and whatever, like Oakland and Hipster, whatever.
So imagine
Is giving you permutations.
But also maybe it gives you the tool to like select something.
Maybe already I'm it's just purely brainstorming now, by the way. Like you had me like full on brainstorming, like
Yeah, there's a model that is really good for like that Apple uses for like removing objects on the scene.
So maybe by the time it gives you the
produce photos, all of the objects are already movable.
So you get does it
What happens a lot of the time is
Someone blinks, but also there's an object that you don't want on the scene.
Like your your baby was like crawling in there or your dog pooped.
And like you want to take it. I have the best one. Argentina. What's the name of that beautiful waterfall? Like the craziest waterfall place. It guasu falls. Take out the tourists. I go there with my my fiance and we
We take this photo under the waterfall, we're kissing is
Somebody takes a photo.
And there's this dude in the like kind of the ang you know in the background there.
And he's got his shirt off and he's taking like a photo for the boys, and it's like ruined this photo. And my wife is like, I wanna frame it because I think it's so funny. And she's like been trying to find a photoshopper to like
Get rid of this thing. And you're right. Like that would be like
Her dream would be the magic magic camera that says
Let me guess you want this guy out of here. Yes. And we have the model that is good at taking the you know detection.
And then good at removal automatically. Yeah.
And uh this is all possible today, you know, your job will mostly be to combine models, create
Pipelines of models.
Yeah, prompting even, right?
Do you think that Apple will just make this kind of default in the camera?
I mean Apple could have shipped Instagram, Apple could have shipped so many things like Apple could also ship that the Zoom
annoying pop over of facial effects, whatever goes away and they haven't is still broken. Like when the balloons come up. So I know I'm I'm in a post worrying about what Apple does world, I'm actually more worried about their
constraints on developer freedom on how they tax you and only let you run one browser engine.
That's kinda my mental motto. Like Apple is like
in the IBM phase of like let's preserve what we have at all costs.
and litigate like they're almost becoming like oracle of our generation.
purely it's all about terms of service and
two point one point one prohibits this like
Hopefully you know
I'm saying this so that the company
Becomes better.
In the interest of like open
public feedback.
Tim Uh Sweeney from um
And real
from Epic Games just had a similar comment on the Lex Free Mill podcast.
I think
There needs to be a world where developers can just ship.
That's the main idea of Urcel and like Apple has sort of been constraining that. So
I'll tell you like
There's so many cameras that you can ship to the phone that people love, right? So
There is Hal Halliday camera, I think it's called, I don't know it's pronounced.
Um, there is obviously Instagram is a camera, right? So
Savages a camera. So
Yeah, and and also but it's also time. Like you know, these things come in these waves about every seven, eight, ten years.
The window reopens on.
You know, the these kind of like uh things. If you just look at Instagram and Snapchat when they
Came out.
It was sort of like this eight year period after Facebook came out. Yeah.
And like
There was enough new stuff, new either new social norms.
Like
People taking pictures everywhere.
New technology like smartphones.
That all of a sudden there was like an opportunity for those. It's now been another
Ten years post Snapchat and Instagram for somebody to build.
A better camera. And there's a wedge through utility.
Like you can build a better camera, you can build a better like, oh just import your photo and start editing like
The the the exact approach, I mean, who knows how this is gonna happen, but it has to happen.
It has to happen that like
I can take great photos.
Even if I don't if I didn't capture everything perfectly, like the AI is already there. Like just make it happen, people.
Yeah, you could even actually just do the camera roll part, right? Because you know, Google photos and all these they try to do this like, Hey, we made a memory and like
You know, like my my mom loves these. It's like oh
I forgot about that. It stitched it together and put corny music on top.
There's no cool factor to that. Those are all pretty totally bad, but it's your photos and your memory, so it's still good enough.
Imagine if you had taste and you did it. Like imagine if Kevin Sistrum and you
You realize oh there's a gold mine on people's camera rolls.
that I could just be generating I could just be mining that and creating like actually good content.
Yeah, there's so many thoughts that come to mind. One is look
Brilliant things happen when people focus and obsess over a problem domain.
So
The operating system makers have so many iris in the fire.
And there has to be someone that just loves
to take great photos and who wants to democratize that with everybody else, right? So that's kinda how I think about it. And there's so many angles.
There is the
Memory video creation.
There is the photo.
There is some aspects of
Shareability of the photos.
So who knows? I mean, like
I think my prediction is more so around like something amazing is gonna happen in this space more than like what is the specific thing.
All right, wanna do a couple of your other ideas.
Oh, this one was clever.
Absurdly smart auto complete.
Like I didn't know when you said that I was like auditably, who cares?
And then I saw your kind of like
brief description, I was like, that's actually brilliant.
Can you explain what this idea is?
Yeah, I think
When it started to become obvious that L LMs were gonna transform software engineering.
It was when we started typing code into a code editor.
And he just suggests it stuff based on
The whole project, the whole
sort of corpus of code that has existed in in humanity.
The next
Wrinkle.
Was that
Things get better.
The richer the context.
So
If you only give the other limit one line of code.
And nothing else?
It also produced something useful.
And it'll blow people's minds and I think
We're in the time of
humanity when like things blow our minds for like a week and then we get imm immediately bored and used to it.
Um but the next wrinkle was
What if you put the content of your clipboard?
Into the
Uh into the prompt.
Because
Developers typically
Or like
What they just saw.
They put into their clipboard.
because they intend to search for it or make a mutation. So
what's in the clipboard it's likely to be kinda what's in your mind. Could help, yeah. Right.
And so our competitions get better.
And then they get better with more context and they get smarter models and and with search.
Because now
When I
And in a different file.
I'm likely to be writing code that is related to
the dependency of this other file.
So long story short
Things get better.
Від бере контекст.
And auto completion is sort of the first manifestation of
How
L's and AIs can
Enhance your cognitive ability. Yeah, I mean it's just in time.
Expertise.
Right.
Line right while I'm writing it. Yes. Give me the perfect thing right there without me having to leave, go, ask, think, think of a question. Just give me a suggestion right there.
So now
What's the that worked in code. You're saying
What about the rest? Yeah, exactly. And in
I get frustrated with like how bad spell checking is. So if you look at
You know
Mac OS spell checker has gotten better over the years.
But
It just doesn't know the things that you literally saw ten seconds ago.
Like someone tells you, Hey, can you
Can you send me the D Zero?
Someone says in Slack.
And then you go to an email.
And you start writing V zero and and a and and Apple goes
I think you meant
Via
Like it comes up with a new word and it's like no no no I literally just was talking about this.
How could I possibly want to not write that down?
And so
That's gonna where the inspiration came for it.
And I think there's a lot of ways to go about this. Like one is like you enhance the operating system.
It's not a is a non trivial task.
But I think this general
idea applies to so many things where
We forget.
That's
The LMs are here.
The context is not evenly distributed.
Meaning
If you just put the right things into the prompt.
Magic will happen.
Without changing the uh actual sort of
Engine of intelligence.
And so that example you gave of like the V zero one sounds minor, like oh, who cares? You it's you just
Push bad space twice.
And just fix it.
But what you're saying is
If the AI knows
what I'm talking about, what I'm thinking about, what I'm working on, what we're doing.
Then
In the same way that in code, it auto suggests the right code because it knows about my whole file. The multiple files in the projects.
It'll do the same when I write that email. It won't just give me the generic thing. It knows how I talk and it knows what we were talking about and it knows what the plan was that I'm trying to relate to this guy. Yeah, it's like the Black Mirror
the entire history of you. Is that the one where the camera's like
It's like your memory is an external memory, basically.
The other thing that's really interesting is that this systems are all about next token prediction, right? And
Right now we're not fully exploiting that because we're not
putting in the sequence of everything we're doing and everything we're thinking about.
every time you go from app to app, that content is getting lost.

Tend to work sequentially.
What happens is
I read an email.
That is about a problem.
And then it go in another app.
And I'm likely gonna discuss that problem.
But I'm gonna try to look for the person that is an expert in that problem.
So
The other way to go about this is like
You know, how can you ingest
This series of apps and integrations and systems.
That people used to do their work.
And you connect the thoughts.
There's one more that you have here. You said uh
More granular V zero.
So this is almost like hey, come
Disrupt us. Yeah. It's it's what I talked about with the game engine, right? Like
just like Chad G D got broken down into like individual things
We have a big effort at Versea to sort of like we wanna be the platform of platforms.
We want the next
Shopify.
To be born out of her cell.
And what I
anticipate will happen is that if an entrepreneur says
I wanna make it easy for people to sell online.
They're probably just like we did with the type form exercise.
They're probably gonna start with AI. They're gonna they're they're not gonna build the same
Shopify that exists today.
Didn't create something that starts with
Intelligence.
It starts with maybe importing a photo of the product that you want to sell.
Maybe it starts with a prompt.
Of what you want your sore to be.
Maybe it's so smart that like if it's a physical store that already exists, it knows everything about it. Just take one button, create the store.
And it ingests all the products and SQs and categories and whatever.
So similar to the game engine
thought experiment that we went through. Like
That would be a more granular V zero. It's like
Okay, B Zero can create anything.
But
And the reason that this would work out is that
It's the same reason that Shopify worked out. Like
There is things that are very general.
Like AWS, like for sale.
Yeah, Versailles sort of like
A AWS on steroids in a way, like we're making it so easy for people.
But it's still a broad platform on top of which any idea can be deployed.
And so I really believe that AI will transform everything. It'll transform website building. It will transform e commerce. It'll transform form building. So a lot of the exercise that I do is that look, there's gonna be
V zero for l legal.
Uh our
Our general counsel uses a tool called G C dot AI.
G C dot A. I is essentially
V zero for lawyers.
And it was built on the Verse platform. And and the other wrinkles.
So like you can prompt your way to, you know, saying like I need this contract between these two parties or I need to review a contract and I need to import documents and so that's kinda what I mean by the more granular V zero. It's more like a
Team.
That specific idea.
One of the other
Things I wanted to ask you about. Something I brought for you.
I thought this was incredible. This is a piece of uh, you know, internet internet history here. So explain what I just handed you and uh the backstory of this.
Thanks for printing this out because
I use this example so much as like the magic of Silicon Valley.
I was
I ended up at this party.
You know the classic like
Could have been an office warming party, something along this lines, or like meetup.
And people were you know
having conversations, passing out drinks, and he met this gentleman named Brian Armstrong.
And he did something that I find myself doing a lot.
Is I walk up to people
Not with
networking agendas or
random ideas. I walk
Up to people with content.
I wanna show them something. Okay. I wanna show them an app.
I woke up to people and strangers, you mean or wh what are you talking about? Well be people in the concept of like networking and I might have been a man or whatever. But I could do it with an overdriver. Like I I I have no limits. So he walked up to me and he's like
Here's the I I'm working on Coinbase.
It's uh
Yeah, it's like a bank for digital currency.
And I'm building an app.
And he shows me the app.
And then he goes.
If you install the app
I'll send you a bitcoin.
Just think about how crazy that is. Like
If you install an app
Like
F first of all, twist my arm. I love trying out new things.
Yeah, I loved Bitcoin at that time.
I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars or whatever. The date the date is on this email. What year was this uh that we're talking about? So November ninth.
twenty twelve.
So
It's the magic of the Bay Area because
You can just walk up on both sides.
You can just walk up to people and show them things.
You can see their reactions, you can get their feedback, etcetera, etcetera.
And on my side And there's some people on the street that will show you some things you didn't ask for too. That's another part of San Francisco you it comes with a lot of diversity. And uh
But on my side.
You know, it's like, well, you can be the r on the receiving end of new ideas, new opportunities, new
Like you can invest like if I had been an investor at the time, I was like, Hey, this Brian guys is pretty smart and
He's hustling hard.
In digital currency.
Might as well give it a shot, right?
So yeah, things for he sent you this email. He sent you the Bitcoin. So the important thing is that it says worth
Ten dollars.
And eighty one cents.
Yeah.
For the app installed. Now that's a hundred and three thousand dollars.
As of this morning.
The following Coinbase for many years.
At the time I think it was poor.
Or I had just began I
I can't remember exactly when I sold my company.
But it couldn't angel invest, most likely at this time.
But that was the other thing that I started doing when I sold my my first company, right? Like
I put it all back into the game.
Which is kinda crazy.
In fact,
I talked to this guy who I really respect it in the JavaScript community
And
And he was like
He was also starting to do angel investments and he goes
Well, the way that I treat bit Bitcoin is like an angel investment.
I put in a twenty thousand dollar check into Bitcoin.
And I remember when I sold my company did that.
Uh in and it was probably also because of the serendipity of like
having Coinbase and you know this infrastructure that that was
nascent but I was I had been exposed to
the magic of Silicon Valley is that you can still do those things. You can just
Like make things happen.
Did it also help?
That you were
Yeah.
born and raised in Argentina and you had seemed kinda like
Maybe you questioned currency more than the average bear did, right? A hundred percent.
A hundred percent. So the concrete memory I was a young child, but
It had everyone in Argentina stressed.
The F out.
Was
And people can fact check us and look this up, but it was like I think we had like three precedents.
In three days.
Uh
One precedent had almost like uh
He rage quit.
Uh because it was an economic and financial meltdown.
I think it was this was about like two thousand, two thousand one.
the next guy comes in and he's like, Oh, cool, and uh the vice president becomes president, somebody long the science is like, Cool, I I'll try to fix it.
Two weeks in he's out too.
And then someone comes in who I I'm not even sure if he was like literally like next in line.
Another guy comes in.
I think this is the guy that
Uh, I'm pretty sure that he's the third guy.
It it that goes to national T V.
they did they do the whole thing where like they interrupt all of the ongoing channels and they like precedent comes in is like
He's addressing the financial turmoil and he's saying
Look, there's a lot of noise about how
Your dollar savings.
Will get lost.
Uh, and they might get converted into pesos.
And they may get converted at a
non beneficial rate.
And he said
Do not worry, Argentinians. And this is on national TV fully synchronized across every screen in the country. Do not worry.
Your dollars are safe.
If you deposited dollars, this is the exact quote. If you deposited dollars
You will receive dollars.
If you deposited Argentinian pesos.
you will receive Argentinian pesos.
Literally a week later.
It didn't happen.
The dollars get converted.
Into besos.
And then the currency lost its value.
So
Basically your money was stolen from you.
Uh the banks were in
Yeah, cahoots with
the government to make this
Transactions happen.
Your money's effectively just like
When when people joke, I
I take it personally, to see Michael Jordan. People joke, Oh
Bitcoin's just a database.
We could replace it with Postgres and we would get a lot more throughput.
Say well.
Not really. What we had in Argentina was Postgres.
Or m maybe worse, maybe it was Excel or something. And like and the government literally did go in.
In in the currency column said
Select all
Convert. I mean like that is the database that is not immutable.
So
I became extremely pilled with Bitcoin because I have that like I have the concrete memory and I have
My dad screaming at the screen and saying, Like, these people are so corrupt, they're like screwing us.
And then the other thing that happened was all this protests.
of people that had large dollar savings.
That
Uh it was so terrible because
RC has been guilty of this
before melee many times of like
If you're rich.
That's frowned upon. That's terrible. You probably got rich by screwing someone up.
That is like
how the culture was largely configured.
So
It was very hard to empathize with this protest that would happen because people would literally be outside of the banks
protesting that their savings
Got stolen.
But the way that it would get
Sort of um
Um you know
manipulated by the media was are you gonna empathize with that rich guy? Oh, poor him, he's complaining about
His
Huge dollar saving. So
That added even more insult to the injury that there was no empathy
to people that were losing their money.
And so
You know that
Bitcoin seems so obvious in the context of like we need a globally distributed database.
That is immutable.
There has
extreme security guarantees because this is your life.
This is your
The things that you might leave for your kids. This is
Everything that you've worked your entire life for.
You can not trust any given actor.
You can not trust the goverment, you can not trust the banks, you can not trust.
You know
your friends. You can not trust anyone. Like you need to be able to have a cryptographic
Certainty.
You can only trust math and the universe, which is kinda like the two emergent properties of it.
You trust the universe in terms of like the
Energetic.
uh demands on top of which Bitcoin banks that it's so hard
to mint a block, right? And it's so hard to manipulate and do these cyber attacks and whatnot.
And you're also banking on the cryptographic verification. Like you you
If you want to.
You can
be a node and verify the blockchain yourself.
With
software that you run as opposed to trusting the world of like
Is this legit? Is this
The
chain that I should be looking at.
Which is why I mean we can go into a whole different tangent, but like
I've always
B
Uh, somewhat unsympathetic to non proof of work systems because
They create an uncertainty about
What is the right chain to be looking at and um
Uh, in in that category falls like Ethereum and a few others.
Two questions for you.
W uh
Given that you went through that.
Do you like kind of denominate yourself in Bitcoin? Do you like put a huge percentage of your own net worth in Bitcoin or like how how have you
So decided to do that.
I put my entire net worth into Vercelle.
I've always so having said all of this
I always think about the mental model uh that
Warren Buffett has offered of like if I have a if I could have a cube of all gold
On the planet.
And I would look at it and say, Oh, it's this shiny block of gold.
Or I could have a cube of
All of the productive farmland in the US and all of its companies.
What Cube would I rather own?
But it is a false economy.
I wanna own both.
I want Bitcoin.
And I want
assets in product productive assets.
That are gonna grow over time that I also want to support.
And so
I like the idea of by far, first and foremost, placing a better myself in Versea. So that's kinda my primary net worth.
But
If bitcoin is not some percentage of my net worth, I would be really worried.
Because I would
Not have that.
rock solid foundation that I missed.
When I was in Argentina like it
it didn't feel like I had access to something that could be
So reliable and trustworthy.
So I am a fan of a potential future in which everything is denominated under the hood. Everything is
rebased on top of this system. That would be really cool.
I uh
So when I do these podcasts, like the way I
People think that this is the
Oh, how did it go? And I'm like, it's good or bad.
Actually for me, I get the win far before we sit down. Cause I when I know you're coming on, I go down a rabbit hold of Guillermo. And I go and I read your old stuff and I learn from you. Uh that's where I get and I'm in I'm in this for the wisdom. So I'm like
I'm looking for the golden nuggets, the insights, the wisdom, the
frameworks that he uses, the stories that inspire me or I can remember, I can

So by the time I sit down here, this is all gravy. Now I'm here just having chicken nuggets. I'm eating lunch. But one of the things that I saw on your old blog, I think it was like 2016 or something, it was um
A newspaper clipping.
I forget who it was, if it was Edison or who it was, but they had this idea of the energy dollar.
It's wild.
It's wonderful. I've never heard of this. But like I I guess back in the day, like the was it Edison or I don't remember who it was. I can remember. Yeah, it was it was like two of like kind of the luminaries of the time. It was like Ford and somebody else. Yeah.
And they were talking about this concept of an energy dollar like hey, we need a currency.
That's
Based off of like the production of jewels, you know, jewels of energy, jewels of electricity or work.
And then that'll be a more sort of like rock solid curse like it tracks reality coin. It tracks the universe perfectly, right? It's it's also related to w the Kardashev scale and like
our ability to capture
energy from our nearby star and the types of civilizations.
That we are
And the other one that uh the the reason that I've been actually also thinking about this more recently is
We're clearly entering a world in which energy can be
Transmuted into intelligence.
I mien it's already the case that I can do so much test time compute.
that any any problem seems tractable.
with enough cycles of GPUs.
And the only limiting factor does seem to be
our ability to harness energy.
And so
The
the unit of wealth or or the store of wealth has to be something that is
Rare.
Right.
And it has to be something that's
Provable.
And so the idea of tracking our
Yeah, or
Fundamental store of wealth through energy.
I mean I'm
Very intrigued by that. So
Well, dude, thanks for coming on. I think what you built is amazing. Your story's great. You're a big ball of energy and some of these ideas are really, really good. I'll share more. So there's uh there's uh uh free ideas to
thread coming on X. Okay. The sequel. Is it gonna be like a shitty movie sequel where you know just doesn't live up to the first time. But i I did set a high bar. I don't want to I don't want to brag on the side. When that comes out, can we do brainstorm two on here? Because uh th that's what we do here. So much
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I put my law in it like my day song On the road less travel never looking back